Penthouse Interior with Blender and E-Cycles
A great feature from Blender Cycles is the ability to use accurate representations of artificial lights with IES profiles, which can give you an incredible realism when making interior renderings. When we mention realism, it is for both a final render and how it will look after the construction. You can offer a client a view from the room with the same lamp model used in a design.
Unlike many people think when dealing with artificial lights, it is not only about an evening render. You can use it for daylight simulations.
Here is a great example of IES lights' mixed-use with Cycles and an HDR as the environment texture. In the Penthouse Interior project, you can see artist Helmy Ardiansyah rendering a Dining Room and Living Room of that particular project.
The artist uses E-Cycles to get a much faster render with 2000 samples in each image.
If you want to look at some of the settings for that render, you find a screenshot with the values used for the render at the link above.
From the screenshot, you can see all the small lights that have an IES profile attached. An IES profile is a small plain text file describing how light works. You can download many of those profiles by checking the IES Library website. We even posted a review about the site and its massive 75k IES profiles library. All files are free to download.
Using Blender for architecture
Do you want to use Blender for architecture or render your projects using Cycles or Eevee? We have three books available that could help you!
They cover the use of Blender for producing architectural content and also all information you need to render projects in real-time:
- Blender 2.9 for architecture: Modeling and rendering with Eevee and Cycles
- Blender 2.8 parametric modeling: Drivers, Custom Properties, and Shape Keys for 3D modeling
- Blender 3.0: The beginner's guide
- Blender 2.8 for technical drawing
- Blender Eevee: The guide to real-time rendering with Blender 2.8
You can get them in both digital and paperback formats. By ordering those books, you will not only improve your skills with Blender for architecture but also support Blender 3D Architect.
